The passenger portal is the invisible link between you and your passengers. Without passengers there would be no need for any form of passenger transport services. The relationship you have between yourself and your passengers as with your drivers, will be a key success factor in delivering your transport services.
One of the common issues we came across when developing Road XS was the booking window for passengers. Very often you might find for example that a community transport booking office is open 9am – 3pm on Monday to Friday and then closed over the weekend. You sometimes also find that the passenger themselves has difficulty calling the office as the line is busy, and they must wait awhile until they can be handled.
All of this can lead to a bottleneck on the line or as we like to call it a call jam, especially if it is already being used for booking and finding drivers. Ultimately this leads to frustration for the passenger and in some cases, increases their sense of social isolation, especially if they are away from their family and friends or don’t see them often.
A Friendly Passenger Portal
We’ve watched how Road XS has been used and evolved by our clients from a community transport software right into a fully integrated, expansive transport platform. After watching the success of our driver portal (and how in some cases this handles over 80% of driver allocation), we came to realise that the next logical step was to develop a passenger portal.
Initially we thought this would be straight forward. When we factored in people’s varying computer skill levels, variety of devices and the fact that filling in a form can often feel incredibly cold and inhuman however, these were not good ‘feelings’ we wanted the passenger portal to portray to anyone using Road XS. This meant we had to come up with something a little different.
We got to work analysing what happens when your passengers call you on the phone and the processes the caller goes through when handling all different types of transport calls. Sometimes passengers needed a quick chat or clarification, sometimes passengers weren’t sure how long it might take to get somewhere and didn’t want to be late to a medical appointment and sometimes passengers were concerned about how much the journey would cost. They key here was variety.
If you have ever worked in IT, variety is not a good thing when it comes to computer systems. Systems development is all about logic and a set process. It’s not about handling the needs of various outcomes without lots of coding and some serious thought.
Let’s Just Chat
After lots of coffee, brain gym and yoga retreats with monks (kidding!), we decided we just wanted your passengers to have a chat with us. I don’t mean, a one to one, but a friendly conversation. Afterall, that’s what you provide day in and day out over the phones. We had found our outcome and we finally knew what we wanted to achieve. But how? Well we have Olive to thank.
We are pleased to announce that Road XS now comes with an online passenger portal, but with a difference. Your passengers don’t just fill in a form and hope it worked, they actually have a chat with our online bot affectionatly known as ‘Olive’ (it’s an internal family joke here at Road XS!), who will guide your passenger through the booking process with ease.
All your passengers do is press ‘Book Now’ and Olive comes to life after her nap and has a little chat with you to ensure you get to the right place at the right time. Not only that, Olive is available 24/7 and soon she will be accessible via services such as Telegram, What’s App, Facebook Messenger and more! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. It means your services can be accessible even while you sleep in a friendly conversational manner! Unique right?
Don’t worry though! You remain in full control over the journey bookings but what we have done is taken some of the work out for you so that you can streamline your booking process without the need to be on call or experience as we discussed earlier call jams! Your passengers win, you win! Even family members and carers can join in and ensure your passengers are booking with you easily and in a friendly way.
But hey, do you want to know a secret? Think about how much time you can now save to work on growing your services and handling increased demand? How might you ask? Well, we have added a setting, so that after a number of bookings that if you ‘trust’ your passenger to enter their information correctly that it will automatically go into the Driver Pending status. This means that Friday night the passenger can book a journey, Saturday morning a driver goes I’ll do that journey via the Driver Portal and then Monday morning you come into work and what’s this? Journeys are already marked as confirmed and the phones are silent. Now I must stress this above process is optional! It’s not the norm, but it is some of the potential offered to you in Road XS, especially if you experience a high call volume.
If you would like to know more about Road XS or even meet Olive, then we’d look forward to hearing from you and telling you about some of what we have been up to lately on the Road XS platform. We’re here to provide you the technology so you can work in a less stressed frame of mind, have fun and help your community flourish!
